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ECS A790GXM-A Black Series

Phoronix: ECS A790GXM-A Black Series

Earlier this year we had looked at the ECS A780GM-A Black Series motherboard that was powered by AMD's 780G Chipset with SB700 Southbridge. This motherboard worked well with Linux and had received our approval, but since then AMD has introduced their 790GX Chipset with Radeon HD 3300 graphics and SB750 Southbridge. Elitegroup Computer Systems has introduced a new motherboard that relies upon these newest chips. The ECS A790GXM-A Black Series is this newest product and today we are looking at this motherboard at Phoronix.

Indeed, I also noticed that the lower half of the board uses common electrolytic caps. At least the critical power stuff seems to be solid-state.

One thing the review simply must mention was whether or not the tests were performed with the disk controller in AHCI mode or not.

There's been a fair stink about AMD600/700/750 having numerous problems with AHCI, with most folks calling it more or less crippled, at least for Windows. I've also seen a smattering of similar statements from the Linux crowd, though most are older reports.

I'm very interested in picking up a new AMD-based chipset, but not if it doesn't have a working AHCI implementation. If I have to run in IDE-legacy/compat mode, forget it.

Every other review I've read mentions stability and low performance in general compared to everything else on the market. But, those reviews are for Windows, so I'm hoping this board feels okay under Linux.

It's a little tricky to surmise anything about this board performance-wise, since it's only compared to the 780G version, which has much the same hardware (and associated issues, at least on Windows.)

Every other review I've read mentions stability and low performance in general compared to everything else on the market. But, those reviews are for Windows, so I'm hoping this board feels okay under Linux.

It's a little tricky to surmise anything about this board performance-wise, since it's only compared to the 780G version, which has much the same hardware (and associated issues, at least on Windows.)

Write performance still continues to be an issue with ATI chipsets in AHCI mode when compared to other chipsets. The issue is not isolated to windows alone. The issue becomes readily apparent when the system is setup to perform server duties.